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15
and to be encouraged even in the midst of the
disheartening circumstances that beset it.
But to come back to the matter of the table:
looking at the density of the population of England,
and at the mean expectancy of life, we find, in the
first place, that there is but one person to every
half acre of surface, and secondly, that a man at
twenty years of age may expect to live to sixty.
In the City of London there are 179 persons to an
acre, and the expectancy of life is only to fifty
years; in the Western Division of the City there
are 212 persons to an acre, and there the man
must not hope to live beyond the age of forty.
eight. Now if we bring to these facts our knowledge
of the habits of those who are the denizens
of such crowded localities, we shall have no difficulty
in understanding how it is that the hand of
death is so busy among them: in fact, what I have
already said of the condition of Plumtree Court,
applies in a scarcely less degree to that of the
other places which I have mentioned. And
although the mortality and sickness which are
incidental to such a state of things are fearfully
large, yet it is unfortunate that they are not such
as to strike us with a due sense of their importance.
What with the youthfulness of their victims, the
constancy of their action, and the fact of their
being extended over a long period of time, we are
not disposed, at a first glance, to recognise the